by Sheldon Oberman

Passing through the Chicago airport recently, I was appalled by a modern mania that is getting worse. I witnessed two angry strangers rushing towards each other, each shouting into a cell phone. One was pulling a huge suitcase on rollers, the other drove a cart. At the last moment, the driver of the cart swerved and missed the other, yet neither seemed to even notice; they just kept ranting into their phones. Further down the hall I saw a man declaiming loudly and waving his hands as travellers streamed around him. He was dictating into a hands free phone to some invisible being that he saw only in his mind. These were sufferers of what I call Technosis Psychosis, a distorted sense of social reality caused by using a technological device. Other techno psychotics have cut me off in traffic, disrupted my meals in restaurants, and distracted me in theatres.
These sufferers may be perfectly polite to whoever they speak to electronically but they are oblivious to those around them. They act as if those transmitted voices they are hearing are more real than actual people.
A friend of mine was paddling on a isolated northern lake when a man canoed past him so absorbed in a cell phone conversation that he did not even acknowledge him. Did the fellow think he was in some office in Toronto?

Are electronic devices becoming preferable to meeting someone face to face? A friend had great online conversations with a woman in another city. Her charm and intellect made her a fascinating companion for years till she announced she was passing through town and wanted to meet him. As you might guess, it was a disaster. They hemmed and hawed and looked away as if they'd been stripped buck naked. It took them months to suppress that moment of reality and regain their elegant online personalities.
Humans are so imperfect and unmanageable; perhaps there is something attractive in reducing people to mere voices on a phone or words on a computer screen. When you become tired of even those limited interactions, you can retreat to the complete voyeurism of TV. When Robert Kennedy was shot and lay dying in a convention hallway most of the reporters within clear sight of him crowded around a TV monitor instead to get "a better view".
I felt the lure of transmitted images at the Winnipeg Folk Festival this summer. I wanted a place near the stage but my friend preferred to sit further back to see the performers on a huge outdoor video screen. When I said the screen made the performance feel like a drive in movie without cars, a kid behind us murmured, "Yah, cool, eh!"

Maybe transmitted images are "cooler" than live performers. Our world is so altered by technology, its natural to be unnatural. We can't expect to live and work in intimate contact with everyone we know like some primitive tribe. Technology has separated us from friends and family but it compensates us with friendly celebrities and familiar TV characters. I recently overheard a group talking about an embarrassing situation involving Rachel and Ross the night before. I eventually realized they weren't gossiping about actual friends, but about their TV "Friends". (editor - I mean to indicate the TV show)
The more isolated we become, the more devices offer us companionship. Media's most recent substitute for real relationships comes from reality based TV; those untrained actors who "act" more real than trained actors. It doesn't really matter how real they seem; once they are televised they become mass marketed fantasies like all the rest. Will they be available whenever you need them like real friends? Certainly, as long as you have a VCR.
McLuhan predicted a global village where everyone is electronically linked to everyone else. Was it a promise or a threat? We seem connected to an endless number of transmitted voices and images yet disconnected from the actual people in our neighbourhoods and communities.

AT times, I need to turn off and tune out. I need to catch up with my oldest "actual" relationship - my self. Being alone, being all by myself was more difficult in my youth but even then it had rewards. A scene comes to mind; after school in a dingy basement I would peel potatoes for my parents' restaurant. My old radio had such static I seldom listened. Instead I listened to myself for two hours each day for three years. As I peeled potatoes, I peeled through layer after layer of my thoughts, feelings, fantasies and I learned the quiet joy of contemplation. Occasionally, a friend dropped by. We'd peel together and the monotony released our imaginations. We'd talk about school and movies and invent outlandish fantasies. And so I learned the giddy pleasures of good company; lively talk and the power of a well told tale.
Someone looking in might have pitied me and provided a proper radio or TV to break the boredom. I probably would have been grateful. And I would never have known what I was losing.
END

Sheldon Oberman is an author, storyteller and teacher in Winnipeg
www.sheldonoberman.com please ask permission before making copies to distribute